Documentation

Written by Greta Hawes

For several years now I’ve been meaning to update what we call ‘“the Bible” — our manual for data collection where we collate all the various principles and practices we’ve worked out over time.

Finally, six weeks ago, I sat down with my extraordinary RA, Rosie Selth, and we tackled the task together.

Like any big project, MANTO has grown and changed in ways we would simply not have predicted when we started out. Revising a big document that we first put together in 2018, I was struck by how many things we were very concerned with then that just haven’t turned out to cause problems; and how many of the things we’re struggling with now we had no sense of back then.

Anyway, this morning we finally finished the “new” Bible. It’s here; all 66 pages of it.

Getting all this sorted is really just a prelude to what promises to be a big “summer” (= southern hemisphere winter) of data. Scott and I will be finalizing some tragedies, plus Pindar, and Lucian. The American team will continue working with Apollonius and the D-Scholia, and the Australians will start adding some geographers, starting with Pomponius Mela.

Page from MANTO’s Manual for Data Collection